


Orbiting

by MaryPSue



Category: Guardians of Childhood - William Joyce, Rise of the Guardians (2012)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Burns, Gen, Graphic Description, Headcanon, Time Travel
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-08-31
Updated: 2014-08-31
Packaged: 2018-02-15 15:06:09
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 2
Words: 7,559
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2233485
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/MaryPSue/pseuds/MaryPSue
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The life, death, and rebirth of Seraphina Pitchiner.</p>
<p>(Canon-compliant up until the end of book three. Contains a whole mess of headcanon, timeline fudging, and denial. You have been warned.)</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Prologue

**Author's Note:**

> I promised to write something of my headcanons for Seraphina ages ago, before book four appeared and jossed them all, but I never had a full, coherent plotline until now. This is part of [the](http://gretchensinister.tumblr.com/post/57677493325/war-scythe) [OT3](http://gretchensinister.tumblr.com/post/66749892545/i-saw-the-scythe) [Golden](http://marypsue.tumblr.com/post/63323662034/hides-face-i-have-no-excuses-and-only-this-by) [Age](http://gretchensinister.tumblr.com/post/86147955203/a-perfect-circle) ['verse](http://tejoxys.tumblr.com/post/93065493796/vicious-cycle) that I and some friends on tumblr have been playing around with (warning, the first three links are NSFW and book canon is treated like a buffet - take what you like and leave the rest), but all you really need to know is that Seraphina grew up with Sandy as a second father and lost her mother fairly young.

She goes back, sometimes.

She’ll leave this patch of earth alone for centuries, millennia even, avoid it like it’s anathema. Still, no other spirit has settled here.

No other spirit would dare.

The earth had stayed burnt and blackened here for far longer than could be natural, had stood barren of all life, a graveyard for nothing but wreckage and a single corpse. For an age, not even a breath of wind stirred the air around the crater and its sole inhabitant, so serene she might have been sleeping but for the angle of her neck and the burns on her body, even as the world exploded in green around it.

The corpse is gone, now, long since overgrown with carefully-chosen flowers, bones crumbled into earth. The crater is a basin of lush, tropical greenery, magnificent even by the standards of the rainforest that sprang up around it. All that remains to mark this place as hallowed ground is the faint, irregular outline of the wreckage, an elongated bullet shape under a carpet of rich moss and centuries’ worth of composted leaves. Its shape clearly identifies it, to any who can still read such things, as a reconnaissance vessel, just as surely as the insignia painted on its side would, if it were still visible. A relic of a defeated army, protectors of a forgotten age. A morbid monument to a life long lost.

She doesn’t visit often. The last time she did was when she broke the spell holding the crater in stasis, unleashed countless years of growth on it at once. She hasn’t seen or touched it since, letting the forces of growth and decay do their work unaided.

The last time she visited was just before a bright new moon settled into orbit in her skies, and two stars, one bright, one dark, fell to the face of her earth.

She returns, now, under a sky full of stars, the accusing face of that moon softening to a gentle glow when it falls on the mound that was once a ship. She pays it no mind. She doesn’t need its pity.

She thinks, for a moment, of what she might find beneath the mound should she choose to unearth it. Would anything have survived the ravages of time and decay? Would she be able to cut it open, put another scar in the skin of her world, to find, preserved, an old life that no longer feels like hers? Would she find anything but mangled chambers and burnt and broken objects, would she find anything but dust? Would she, like an archaeologist excavating a burial mound, be able to piece that life back together?

In the end, she leaves the ship sinking slowly out of memory. Instead, she lies down in the place where her shattered bones had fed flowers, shuts her eyes, and lets herself be pulled apart, drawn down into the whispering world.


	2. Chapter 2

Her father leaves, and pity floods in to fill the gaps. It surrounds her wherever she goes, invisible but all around, holding everyone suspended just out of reach. Every time someone stops talking and darts fearful eyes in her direction, she feels it filling her lungs, thick and cloying as syrup, turning every movement, every breath, into a struggle.

Sleep is no escape. Her dreams are dripping black, old scars aching like a change in the weather. She dreams of her mother’s smile and wakes screaming; all through the long night that follows, her eyes refuse to close. She turns Sandy (‘sand-daddy’, childish name, childish comforts) away when he offers to make her sleep sweetly. Even the thought feels like drowning.

But she can’t stop counting shooting stars, lying awake in her bed and watching with eyes bleary from too many hours, tracing their trails and trying to name their destinations. Lyra. Rigel. Betelgeuse. Worlds she knows. Worlds she doesn’t. Worlds beyond the edges of every map.

Worlds where her father’s name can’t follow her.

…

Sandy finds Seraphina early in the morning, sitting worn-thin tired on the floor of a darkened room, her eyes huge and bruise-shadowed in the secondhand glow of a reel of footage from the christening of her father’s old ship. The tiny shimmering figures spark and flicker as they hover above the bronze casing of the projector, a sure sign they’ve been running too long. Koz, Cybele, and himself in miniature, all smiling, and the small white-clad figure of a child-Seraphina darting between them, hair loose and silent laughter on her lips. As Sandy watches, the hologram of Koz sweeps her off of her feet and into his arms, her mouth growing wide in a shriek of delight as he tosses her effortlessly onto shoulders made of nothing but light and memory.

Sandy wonders how many times that night Seraphina had watched this.

She doesn’t turn to face him when he reaches over to shut off the projector. The happy family condenses to a single point of light, and then winks out of existence.

"I want to go away," Seraphina says, without looking away from the now-dark place where her father’s image had stood.

"Where do you want to go?" Sandy asks, soft, steady, the kind of voice he’d use on a startled comet. It isn’t loud. It doesn’t have to be.

"I don’t know. I don’t care." At last, Seraphina looks over at Sandy, and he’s struck by how clear her eyes are, how steely. "Will you teach me to fly a star?"

The only thing Sandy can imagine her doing with a star right now is flying it directly into the nearest black hole.

"We’ll talk about that once you’ve had some sleep," he says, at last, deliberating for a moment before reaching out to put a hand on her shoulder.

"I don’t want to -"

"I’ll make you a good dream." There was a time, Sandy thinks, when that promise would have been a treat, not a necessity.

Seraphina looks, for an instant, as though she might argue, before the anger drains out of her expression, leaving only a resignation that makes something tighten painfully around Sandy’s heart.

"All right," she sighs, pushing herself heavily to her feet. Sandy expects her to look back as she leaves, but she doesn’t give the soft, dim glow of the cooling projector so much as a second glance.

Sandy can’t quite say why this scares him more than her looking back would have. Or perhaps he can, and doesn’t want to.

She’s always been so much like her father.

…

In the end, it’s not a shooting star that takes her from her home, from the empty hallways, empty rooms, the echoing silence that settles on everything like dust, building in ever-thicker layers until she feels it muffling even screams she hasn’t yet let go.

Her father’s name follows her into the ranks of the Golden Army, her father’s living ghost hovering at her elbow at every turn, until she feels certain that the eyes of everyone who speaks to her turn to his face instead, only finding her to measure her against the long, long shadow he has cast. Their eyes are books, laid open, always, to the same page; wondering how, with her lineage and her name, she could be anything short of the second coming of her father.

She is the ghost here, even though she can feel her heartbeat pounding its war-drum tempo through every vessel in her warm, living body. Nothing but a ghost, haunting the training camps as she had the abandoned halls of home. Nothing has changed.

It’s a good thing that there are no new missions to be undertaken, no voyages setting sail for uncharted stars. It’s what they’ve fought for, what they’ve died for. For the veteran soldier who wants nothing more than to return home without wondering where the dark will creep in next, it must be the realisation of a dream long thought impossible.

All she wants is to disappear.

…

The crackle of a call coming in interrupts Commander Haregård’s concentration on the pattern of forestation he’s designing for a series of small worlds that had been unknown until not so long ago. This lack of knowledge is due not to any failure on the part of explorers or mapmakers, but rather the fact that this corner of the galaxy had been a no-man’s-land of dark stars and darker creatures – until the Golden Army had swept through, scouring the string of shadowed planets with brilliant, burning light.

When he’d first been appointed commander of the 1st Terraforming division, Haregård had privately questioned why an army would need such a division at all. Balancing planets, stabilizing environments, hadn’t seemed like a job for a military force.

He doesn’t question it any longer. Every empire needs its colonizers.

The face on the screen, when at last it flickers to life, is familiar, if unwelcome. Haregård stifles a disappointed sound, schooling his face carefully into military blankness. He thought he’d found a solution that suited everyone, got her out of his hair and away from the simulators where she’d already wreaked untold damage on carefully-calibrated coded ecosystems with her volcanic explosions and unprecedented ice ages, yet still kept her far enough away from any actual planets that she couldn’t unleash her particular brand of volatile, dramatic landscaping on their unsuspecting surfaces. How in the names of all the stars has she managed to screw up a _scouting mission_?

He could almost forgive her her inability to maintain the absolute calm, the perfect clarity, required for the kind of very fine work his best craftsmen can do, sculpting the path of an entire world from the turn of a single leaf, a hurricane from the flap of a butterfly’s wing. After all, it’s nothing personal; Constellans just don’t make very good terraformers, don’t have the patience that the Pooka do. He hadn’t even wanted her on his squad, certain that he wouldn’t be able to teach her what she’d really need to know in order to do this job well. But who in the Golden Army could say ‘no’ to Pitchiner’s daughter?

Certainly not himself, Haregård thinks, as the figure on the screen executes a sharp salute, a gesture which he acknowledges with a nod. She stares back at him solemnly in between bursts of static, the very image of her father (Haregård has to stop himself from adding ‘late’); golden-skinned, hawk-faced, with piercing eyes of a startling clarity, changeable as storms over sea. Her image jumps and flickers with the static as they dispense with the niceties, making him feel slightly seasick. “What is the purpose of your call, cadet?” he asks, hoping to end this conversation quickly.

Pitchiner’s – _young_ Pitchiner’s – voice is as grave as her face. “Sir, I followed the coordinates you gave me to what should have been a barren star.”

“It is a barren star, cadet,” Haregård reaffirms. At least, according to his maps, it is, and by what little information he has on this backwater star, it’s too old to produce a solar system from scratch now. If she’s gotten herself turned around somehow –

“Sir, then I have reason to doubt my instruments, sir.”

Haregård manages, with great force of will, not to sigh. “Why do you -” he starts, and then stops short as the fizzing, crackling image on his screen swings around and he gets a clear sight of what is unmistakably the barren star he himself charted. And ringing it, soaring elegantly through the ink-dark reaches of uncivilized space, are –

“One of them is egg-shaped, sir.” The image returns to young Pitchiner, the barest hint of a smile brushing the corners of her eyes.

“Those aren’t natural,” Haregård says, after a moment’s deliberation. “Someone made them, and I want to know who, and why. Cadet Pitchiner?”

“Sir?”

“Put your ship into wide orbit. Stay clear of the outer planets if you can. And observe. I want a record of everything you see, how old the planets are, how many there are, their composition, their orbits – anything you consider important. Compile a report, and send it back to me.” He wonders whether he should add an admonition not to engage, but decides against it. There’s a suspicion brewing around the ovoid shape of the sole blue-green marbled planet, a suspicion he’ll have to leave for later. “Do nothing more until you have further instructions.”

“Sir.” There’s a _blip_ , and the image of Pitchiner’s daughter shrinks to a single point of light before vanishing.

Haregård takes a moment to consider just how carefully she’s likely to follow his instructions, and makes a mental note to find out whether the mystery terraformer is who he suspects it is sooner rather than later. It’ll be better to be able to tell the young Pitchiner who she’s dealing with, rather than have to hear it from her after she’s already done something stupid.

He manages, through great force of will, not to sigh.

She’s so much like her father.

…

The worlds around the second-rate star quickly become as familiar as the bright points of any constellation, their slow looping circles the steps of a dance the equal of any dance counted out on golden floors. Here, though, the dancers have no partners, tracing out their celestial cycles in perfect solitude. Each of the worlds is a tiny gem on black-velvet emptiness, each haloed by an atmosphere more bright, more lovely, than the lustre of any jewel.

She wonders, once, whether her sand-daddy ever saw this star, and turns her mind quickly to the play of gases across the surface of the blue, ethereal mist that is the substance of the nearest planet.

Her reports spare no detail at first, but quickly turn sparse and strange, descending from professional, stark observations of scientific phenomena into poetry, rambling phrases and snippets of description trying and failing to capture the colour of the rings of brilliance encircling one of the great outer planets, the play of light through the eye of solid, perpetual storm that adorns another, inner world, the quiet certainty and purpose of their slow, solemn spinning through space. The absolute solitude of her orbit; the beauty of it, the silence. The electric potential of freedom, the wild, savage joy and dizzying terror of belonging to no one, nowhere, nothing.

She doesn’t mention the loneliness that makes her small ship alternately vaster than a citadel and closer than a coffin.

The single egg-shaped planet blooms quickly, more so than the others, and she finds herself turning her gaze in its direction more than in any other, watching its face change with each rotation. It seems almost something she saw once in a dream, the same kind of hazy, half-forgotten familiarity, and before long, without quite knowing how, she discovers she considers it her own. She has no hand in the crawl of its continents, the swirl of storms and the creep of vegetation across its surface, but she watches them nonetheless with a kind of pride. And she pulls her orbit closer, ever closer, until she can watch as creatures the likes of which she’s never seen before grow and change under her eyes.

Perhaps she should have looked away from the planet more often. Perhaps she should have been more wary of the void around her.

But she isn’t, and she doesn’t, and the only warning she gets is a glimpse of a small ship, an egg-shaped one-man craft of a design she barely recognises as Pookan, tearing a line of fire through the ink-dark of space as it hurtles towards what she’s come to think of as her planet. She considers calling her commander for only the briefest of instants before she moves to intercept the intruder.

She doesn’t notice, in the afterimages of its bright passage, that the little craft has a shadow. She doesn’t see the _impossible, impossible_ dark vessel until the first bolt strikes her hull and throws her to the floor.

She does her best, amidst the shrieks of her instruments, to put up a fight, but her small bullet of a ship is meant only to observe, never to engage. At last, the steely side of her ship is a blow away from shattering and her instruments have gone deathly silent, leaving her to handle the limping craft with only the strength of her arms and her own sharp eyes. And the jeering faces of the _impossible, impossible_ nightmares manning the dark ship are drawing closer with each breath she draws.

Through the numbing fear that clogs her throat and leadens her limbs, what she must do strikes her as surely and as painfully as any shot from the dark ship. She tries to will her hands to stop shaking as she hauls her ship into position, tries to swallow the icy bite of mounting dread, but while she can push it aside, she can no more keep it out than she can the insidious thoughts that question, if this ship is here, what has become of her father.

She wonders, for a moment, whether he’d be proud of her now.

Then she punches the accelerators and rams into the dark ship with all the unstoppable momentum of long years of orbit.

There’s a shattering moment of impact, a shock of pure suspension, her bones shaking themselves to pieces even as both ships hang weightless in the eye of the storm, and then the fuel tanks explode. Huge roses of flame, blooming like ink through water, a wall of unbearable heat slamming into her from either side, every shadow extinguished immediately in the flare that, for a single shining second, births a brand-new star into the black void.

Flames claw her limbs, devour her hair. And then there is only darkness, and the skeleton of her ship falling through freezing space.

…

Bunnymund doesn’t know, until the first shots ring out through the velvet silence of space, that his pursuers are still on his tail. His nose twitches at the realisation that he must have brought them with him. Sloppy traveling, that’s what it was. Letting his emotions get the better of him. The others - the others would be so disappointed if they could see him now.

Sloppy. Reckless. Foolish.

Desperate.

At least this way, he tells himself peevishly, furious with himself for more reasons than he can name, they still stand a chance. He can’t change any of what is to come, has already changed too much simply by stealing away with the Light like this. But had he not, it would have been snuffed! The most sacred trust of the Pooka, the one thing they’d all give their lives for - all _had_ given their lives for. He could not have betrayed that trust, could not have let the Light of the universe be extinguished.

Could not let his people’s sacrifice be in vain.

A second shot jars him out of his dark thoughts, and he tries to pull more speed out of the small escape capsule. Of course, if he’s caught now, it will all be in vain anyway. Whatever dark things have come in his pursuit will take the Light, will devour it, and the universe will end. Slowly, as old stars and old worlds die without any new ones born to take their place, but end it will. And all because of one reckless Pooka who let his _feelings_ get the best of him and made one sloppy time jump -

A third shot is fired, and this time he wonders why the lack of impact. They’re usually much better shots than this, aren’t they? They certainly had been, when they’d been raining down inky weapons on the city -

He looks back, and nearly chokes in surprise. A single Golden Army vessel, reconnaissance by the looks of it, is turning to fire a glittering rocket directly into the prow of his pursuer’s ship. Where had _that_ come from? He’d built this solar system out of the way on _purpose_! It was supposed to be a retreat _away_ from all the politics and pomposity of the Constellar empire!

His indignation lasts only until the dark ship fires a volley into the hull of the Golden Army vessel, rocking it backwards and causing a shower of sparks to spurt from its side like arterial spray. This ship might only buy Bunnymund enough time to get to the surface of the planet and onto solid ground, _his_ ground, but that might be enough for a victory. It certainly won’t be, though, if he doesn’t hurry up.

He turns all his attention to getting more speed out of his little egg-shaped craft. His success is only moderate, but it’s enough to put him within the protective shield of the atmosphere when the collision above fills his viewscreen with flaring supernova light.

He checks his sensors, and finds no sign of the black ship. It and its nightmare crew are obliterated, erased from the silent canvas of space by the brilliance of the explosion as much as by its force. His question of how the Golden Army pilot managed such a feat with only a lightly armed recon vessel is answered when his sensors pick up the white-hot shell of a bullet-shaped ship, tearing through the atmosphere towards him.

Bunnymund engages thrusters and pulls up short in midair, only to watch the wreck scream past him, trailing flames so hot they’ve become invisible in places, and tumble towards his precious planet. He has only a moment to spare a despairing thought for all the geography he’d got _just right_ , all the plants and creatures he’d spent _so long_ coaxing into existence, before the wreck strikes the surface. A cloud of dust and ash slams into his ship, tossing the tiny vessel like a toy and carrying an overwhelming stench of burning to his sensitive nostrils. By the time he’s able to get his bearings again and bring his craft slowly and carefully down to the surface, the cloud has mostly settled, spreading in a thick, dark grey cloud both through and beneath the atmosphere. What rays of sunlight can still force their way through are weak and yellowed as old paper, and seem as brittle, and the air still stinks of burnt hair and choking dust, but then, at least he can still see. And he doesn’t plan to stay here long.

He lands gingerly, waiting for the ground to cool from molten heat to merely blisteringly hot, before he sets off to examine the crash site. It’s true, the explosion had taken out the dark ship ( _and_ , most likely, all of Bunnymund’s lovely giant lizards) but he doesn’t know who might have been piloting the Golden Army ship. For all Bunnymund knows, it could even have been a star pilot on the lookout for a new star to lasso, and he’ll be so prepared for the heat and light of comets that the explosion will have left him without even a scratch.

When Bunnymund finds the wreckage, though, the pilot lying just clear of the ship itself in the middle of a massive crater is neither a star pilot nor a man. The young woman is badly burned, but nowhere near as incinerated as any other Constellan in her position ought to be. Star blood, Bunnymund decides, trying to quiet his stomach; the stench of burning hair and smell of cooking meat that waft from the girl’s, it must be said, mangled body are turning it quite violently. There’s no way she’d be so intact otherwise, no way she’d be anything more than a handful of vapours drifting in the aether.

Another lost in the protection of the Light of creation, he thinks, before he can stop himself. Another lost due to his foolishness.

How had everything gone so wrong? It had seemed like an excellent plan, as he’d hatched it, but then, any plan might have seemed excellent when the other option was being killed horrifically by the corrupted, murderous shell of what had once been the age’s greatest hero and letting said maniac destroy the entire universe. The Light _should_ have been safe here, in the past, before the self-titled “Nightmare King” had even come into being. It should have been doubly safe, hidden away on a tiny planet entire galaxies away from anywhere anyone had ever heard of, a planet that no one even knew _existed_ , so that when the time came and the worst came to pass it wouldn’t be where anyone would look.

Instead, though, he’d managed to bring a ship full of nightmares into the past _with_ him, and before he could even _blink_ , already another innocent person had been cut down trying to keep the Light safe. Even if she didn’t know what she was protecting, she came to the aid of a stranger in distress when he needed it most, and as her reward, she’s lost her life.

Not quite lost yet, though, he realises, as her brow creases and her lips part as far as the burns will allow, strings of melted flesh all that holds one-half of her jaw together. Her one remaining eye cracks open, and startling spring green pierces Bunnymund to the heart. She’s still alive, though barely. And with that thought, another foolish, reckless, desperate idea plants its stubborn seeds in his mind.

"Look what a mess you’ve made of my lovely planet," he scolds, wondering even as he does just what in the name of whatever star you’d like to name he’s even _saying_ , what kind of babble is spilling from his mouth as he thinks furiously. “I was very fond of those lizards, I’ll have you know. I don’t think any of them are going to survive _your_ dust cloud. Not to mention everything else on the planet! And _I_ won’t be able to give it the time and attention it takes to rebuild an entire planetary ecosystem from scratch, good gracious no, I’m a very busy Pooka…” His whiskers twitch at the thought of what he’ll be busy _doing_ for the next foreseeable future. Digging graves, mostly.

But _this_ one he won’t bury.

He crouches next to her, forcing himself not to be sick at the sight. Up close, the smell of cooking is far more pronounced, and he fancies he can hear a faint sizzle as the burns work their way deeper into her flesh.

"You’ll just have to clean up your own mess," he tells her, and cracks open the hatch of the large, golden egg he cradles in both arms, just enough to let a single ray of blindingly brilliant light, too bright to look at, too bright to really _see_ , fall across her single open eye. The new-growth green iris flickers gold for the shortest instant before the light grows too bright to bear, and Bunnymund has to press the hatch shut.

There is nothing left in the open eye of the body before Bunnymund, no intelligence, no pain, no consciousness. No breath issues from its open mouth. But a cool, fresh wind curls around the wide crater that the wreckage lies in, a wind free of dust or ash or smoke and smelling impossibly, new-growth _green_. And Bunnymund, despite everything, smiles.

"I’ll be back later," he promises the wind, which ruffles the hem of his coat and then carries on coiling in small eddies around the skeleton ship and the body. He doesn’t mention that he doesn’t know how much later that will be. He has to find himself - which won’t be hard - and entrust the Light to himself without letting on just _why_ it has to be kept safe on Earth - which will be. And then - he chokes on smoky air, suddenly and strangely unable to draw a deep enough breath - then he has to go back. Back to the timeline where he belongs. Back to a world he no longer recognises. Back to a world where everyone - everyone he loves is gone.

And to think that he’d once thought avoiding paradoxes would be simple.

And to think that he’d once thought he’d never want to live in the past.

…

Pain. A world of it, its skies the strobing red of raw nerves, its horizons fire burrowing steadily into her bones, shrinking with each passing second. Dark skies and ashy smells and a voice are meaningless pinpricks soon carried away on a tide of fire and agony.

The light, though, cannot be ignored, even through the burning; it is everywhere, everything, it fills the world and crowds out the pain to a distant unimportance. Horizons, sky, space, stars, all is light, pinning her down, stripping her, flesh from bone, synapses untangled and splayed out on full display, a pain too deep and solid and strange to be rightly called _pain_ at all piercing every particle of her being, and she feels herself tumbling, sinking dizzily through light as she is taken apart.

The light vanishes, but she keeps falling, into a warm, green dark.

No up or down, no direction, no space, no scale, no feature, only endless darkness, warmth of something living, slow slow pulse. Slowly, faintly, sensation of spinning. Great sedate orbit curves, short swirling pirouettes.

Draw a breath. Struggle. Draw a breath again.

Open eyes. Close. All is dark. Dark is all.

Struggle.

( _volcanic upheavals rip at tectonic plates, rock and ore turned to burning rivers pour across barren land_ )

Scream.

( _mountain ranges crash together as the struggle, the breathless soundless scream, tears its way out from under the earth_ )

Draw a breath.

( _ice scrapes over stone_ )

Draw a breath.

Push up from below. Curl fingers up through solid rock, slow, slow, patient as death. Unfurl leaves and fronds and needles and feelsee light for the first time since. Grow, by tiny tiny fragments; fins to swim, eyes to open, legs to heave up out of floatingdreaming onto greengrowing earth. Too many eyes opening! too much sky, too many green, blink blink flickerclosed, choose, choose, _here_ , there is a _here_ , there is a single point of focus where a vast and spreading consciousness concentrates…

There is a _her_ , looking out through the eyes of a creature she recalls somehow having just made and also having always been. She has a dim feeling that both of these things at once should be impossible. She also doesn’t care.

Eyes blink shut, and she opens them again from nothing and nowhere, to observe the things she’s made - things she’s _grown_. The creature she was a moment ago blinks lazy lizard-eyes at her, wary and ancient, and she laughs at the familiarity of each shining scale. Her laughter is a rustle of treetops, flutter of the wings of brightly-coloured birds, and she frowns a darkening of the bright day. There is a memory of laughter, _her_ laughter, sounding differently. She cannot place it. She cannot make sense of it.

She stops trying. Laughter ripples, sunshine on water, warm wind through leaves, bright wings buzzing, around the vast world she wears as both skin and fractured memory.

"I see _you’ve_ been busy.”

Words. Directed at her. She finds the source with ease, watches silently, a wisp, a whisper, waiting for more words, watching the mechanism of tongue and teeth and vocal cords with the practiced eye of an artist. It doesn’t occur to her that the words have meaning until the speaker asks her for an answer.

"What _are_ these things?”

She steps behind its eyes to see what it means and sees the web-footed creature, the four-legged one with the poison sacs. She doesn’t stay long, but the odd long-eared person with the words gives a short yelp and brushes down the long green covering it wears as though trying to shake something free nonetheless.

"Don’t do that!" It taps the side of one of its ears, turns its eyebrows and the corners of its mouth down. "It is _very_ unsettling for sentient beings!”

She contrives to indicate apologetic feelings. A few raindrops smack against the dirt at the long-eared person’s feet. Its eyebrows come together a little closer, and then return to their usual positions.

"I still want to know what _those things_ are,” the long-eared person says, and oh, it gestures with one appendage towards the web-footed creature, of course.

 _Experiments_ she answers. The leaves rustle and there is a faint thin whine added to the wind.

"In language that we both can understand, please," the long-eared person says, and its eyebrows held like that mean it’s unhappy, doesn’t it? Unhappy, or thinking hard. Had she forgotten that? Had she ever known it? "And if you wouldn’t mind materializing, it would make it _much_ easier to hold a civilized conversation.” Its whiskers twitch.

 _Materializing_. This whole whirling world is her material, what does it expect her to do?

There are memories, faint, of a shape that she was once very attached to, and she tries to fashion it again. The memories are old, and worn, and in places missing completely, but at last she thinks that perhaps she has something of a form, something the long-eared person can address itself to, something that can form words that the long-eared person might understand.

It gives her a considering look, those furrowed eyebrows again. “Fairly accurate, although I don’t remember the scales.”

She shrugs, shivers, covers her flimsy shape in crackling bark.

"Experiments," she says, an answer to questions both spoken and unspoken. The word is strange and familiar at the same time, a meaningless combination of syllables that imparts meaning. _Language._ How strange. How wonderful. How…familiar?

The person speaks to her again, but she doesn’t listen to the words. Something is missing from her understanding, some vital connection between her and her world and this stranger and…his?, and she disregards his earlier objections as she cautiously tests his thoughts for any hint of the lost link. He makes noises of protest, his thoughts filling with jabs and spikes of indignant rage, but he cannot drive her out before she sees it.

A howl ripples through her, silent, and screams out into the world around her now perfectly still form, the winds rising in full voice, their hollow moans and shrieks tearing at the trees and shaking leaves to the ground. The long-eared person looks alarmed, shouts something that falls on her ears as so many garbled sounds, distant and meaningless. She shakes her head, feels the wind whip clouds into a boil overhead, feels the hum of electricity building in her fingertips and tastes its tinny whine on her tongue, feels the shiver and quake of each branch, each blade of grass, as the charge grows in strength and urgency, looking for somewhere to ground itself.

The lightning strikes with explosive force, splitting a tree only inches from where her form had stood right to the root and filling its dry, rotten insides with flame. But the scream goes on, the storm roiling overhead, tossing the forest like a sea as its mistress tries desperately and vainly to earth her distress as easily as she had the lightning.

No matter how many forks of charged particles flicker madly through her atmosphere, though, she cannot seem to shake the image; that form that she had worn only seconds ago, that form that had seemed so well-loved, so familiar, battered, burned, and shattered, lifeless and empty in a wound on her beloved planet. Mortal. Solitary. _Foreign_.

Inescapable.

She does not know how the strange vision is connected to herself, how this tiny tattered husk has any bearing on the queen, the mother, the very soul of the whirling world she lives within, until many years later. She keeps her distance from the long-eared person who seems to think that her planet belongs to him, though she keeps a wary eye on him, sometimes the stray glance of an animal, sometimes the slow and fleeting sense of a tree, sometimes the truly long and deep memory of rock and earth, but always, always aware of where he is and how he moves. She will not risk another encounter like the first.

She visits the place where he had seen her old familiar form, finds it lying untouched. She has been everywhere on this planet - _is_ everywhere on this planet - but her hand has never touched this earth, her many eyes have never seen it. It has never felt her breath. The wreckage lies exactly as it fell, the body lies exactly as it did when the last spark of _something_ left it, in this place which has been her blind spot; for how long, she cannot know.

It rains there, for the first time, while she looks on and feels memories of the slow, solitary dance of orbit press into her mind, feels memory giving shape and detail to the form she wears without her willing it to do so. It feels final, somehow; she will never now be fully and wholly the world, again, she will never forget that words have meanings, that she too has a mind behind her mind that is far older than herself. She will never forget that she is separate.

It rains there, and when she leaves, when she lets the atoms of her temporary/permanent form dissolve back into the living, cycling world and sinks down, the first curls of green life are already starting to venture up through the earth.

Time has passed, she isn’t certain how much, when something tugs at the oceans and she rises into her once and now familiar form to gaze up coldly at the silver circle that has settled into her night sky. She isn’t sure, at first, what it is or what it means or why its gravity is drawing all her water towards it, adding a restless agitation to the sedate cycles of life on her world’s face, but a distant memory is quickly dislodged and she can name the pockmarked circle _moon_.

"Do you see that?" a voice says, very near her, and she turns, startled, to see the long-eared person staring up towards the moon as well. In the sudden swell and ebb of tides, she hadn’t noticed his approach; he could have dropped from the sky or sprung from the ground, for all the difference it makes.

His whiskers twitch as he steals a sideways glance at her. She doesn’t return it, doesn’t speak, doesn’t take her eyes from the moon.

"See what?" she asks, and the chill of an ice age is in her voice.

"That dark spot, against the stars."

He’s no longer looking at her, nor is he looking at the moon; instead, his eyes are turned sharply towards a spot, much like any other, in the vast dark sky. This time, her eye darts to where his gaze lands, and she finds it drawn to a gap, an empty, sucking hole in the bright cosmos.

"It’s the end of everything,"  he says, at last, startling her into turning her face towards him.

"Or the beginning," he continues, thoughtfully, as though the moon is nothing but an idea, a possibility, rather than a gigantic floating rock impossibly far away that is nevertheless filling her veins (she doesn’t have veins, her rivers, her oceans, her vast underground network of water) with a humming, relentless urgency of movement. As though there is nothing up there swallowing down the stars. "I didn’t get this far before. What happens now will be a surprise to both of us."

She makes no answer. Has no answer.

A battle rages in her skies that night. Something bright and golden falls, strikes, steaming, into a stirring ocean, spreads a warmth and a heavy drowsiness through her. The feeling is familiar and strange at the same time, and she feels a shift in the atmosphere, almost impalpable, far from physical.

It in no way prepares her for the blinding flash from the brand new moon that, for a single instant, turns every shadow on her world’s upturned face to silvery light.

It in no way prepares her for the sudden, tearing pain as something raw and dark and _wrong_ tears into and through the skin of her earth.

She cries out, the sharp sound turning to a howl of wind and a crash of wave as her form crumbles involuntarily around her, as she retreats back into the earth like a wounded animal curling around the injury. And, like an animal licking its wounds, it takes her little time to find the site and slip inside, into the hole drilled straight into the bedrock by a force greater than anything on her world before, past the curdled stone and cooling, molten rock underfoot.

There is something at the heart of the cavern that has been torn open in her world, something tall and dark and still as carved obsidian, something pierced by a single shining crystal. She rises, to see it better; she can be as tall as redwoods if she wishes, this is no challenge at all. It is only when she catches sight of the white face hidden in the deep shadows of collar that she knows it is a person, and she peers a little closer, some compulsion drawing her forward just as the moon draws the tides.

And for the space of a single breath, the whirling world stands perfectly still.

Seraphina draws a breath, reaching up without a thought to touch her father’s face. She stops, still, with her fingertips the width of a strand of spiderweb from his cheek, as memories crash over her like waves. The soul of the planet fights back, tries to drag her down again, but she clings to the shape she wears, each breath that burns her lungs a victory. Perhaps it would be easier, to forget, to let go, to heal over this old scar as though it were never made, but with the memories comes a terrifying, staggering sense of what she nearly lost, and she holds to that as fiercely as she can. She has a name. She has a history. She has a family.

She is the soul of this planet. But she is also Seraphina Pitchiner. She is exactly herself, and, she vows, she will not lose sight of that again.

Her triumph turns ashen in her mouth, though, as the shadows shift and rise around her. A sudden wave of fresh terror forces her to turn back to the familiar face that had so startled her, only to draw back her hand with a low sound of despair at the sight of her father’s beloved features so terribly altered. How had she not seen before, how could she not have noticed the way cruelty lines his brow and twists his mouth, the deathly pallor of his complexion, the way the furrow of constant care just above his nose has deepened to a hateful scowl? How had she seen only what she remembered, she who had had no memory until just now?

And, in her forgetting, how much has she missed?

Familiar wide, blank eyes blink open from the shadows along the walls of the cavern, familiar jagged smiles cut the shadows wide, and she dissolves, rising out of the earth at the mouth of the scar in her new skin. Part of her, distantly, considers a rockslide, but she knows before the thought is even finished that the dark would work its way out just the same. Once that kind of infection takes root, there is no way to stop its slow spread.

She shuts her eyes, and raises her hands, and pushes saplings up through the dirt, lets the seeping blackness that is already working its way into her soil grow them gnarled and thick and crooked and barbed as it will. The woods will keep away any wanderers not wise enough to heed the warning chill in the air, the unease in their gut, but it will not deter the bravest nor the strongest nor the most determined in their path. Someone, someday, will find their way down, sword in hand and heart in throat, to the pit where darkness sleeps, waiting only for the right hand to destroy it.

Waiting only for the right hand to release it.

A rockslide, perhaps. A small volcanic vent, difficult, but possible. But she knows, somehow, that these things will not solve the problem, will not burn away the darkness, even if she could bring herself to try. She is the soul of this planet, this planet with this infected wound beginning to fester on its surface, but she is also Seraphina Pitchiner, and some of her scars are much older than this new green earth. This will heal. All things do.

And she can no more stop the adventurous spirits who would try their hand against this new threat, who would see their world safe in a thousand years of brilliant light, than she can the pull of the new moon on her oceans.

She never could.

The trees coil together like thorny prison bars. She lowers her hands, and slips off the old familiar shape, wrapping herself in warm dark earth, perhaps to sleep, perhaps even to dream.

And the Earth spins on, dragging a new silver moon in its wake.


End file.
